Short Biography: Theodor Seuss Geiss

Born Theodor Seuss Geisel, also nicknamed Ted by family and friends, though much better known as his pen name, “Dr. Suess”, was born on March 2, 1904 in Springfield, Massachusetts. At this time, Springfield was highly populated with a multitude of manufacturing companies as well as German immigrants, Ted’s grandparents included. Father, Theodor Robert, helped his father with a very successful family-owned brewery. In 1909, Theodor Robert was chosen for the Springfield Park Board. Geisel often came to the zoo with his father, bringing along a pencil and sketchbook to draw exaggerated doodles of the animals in. Ted’s mother, Henrietta Seuss Geisel, would often lull him and his elder sister to sleep with her rhythmic chants. She would chant “softly,

in the way she had learned as she sold pies, ‘Apple, mince, lemon … peach, apricot, pineapple … blueberry, coconut, custard, and SQUASH!” He later credited his mother “for the rhythms in which I write and the urgency with which I do it.”
Although the brewery provided the Geisels with great financial success and stability for many years, the start of World War I and Prohibition presented many challenges for the Geisels.

Geisel’s peers scoffed at him for being of German descent. So, as to prove his patriotism, Geisel became one of the top ten U.S. Liberty Bond sellers with the Boy Scouts. When former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt came to his town to award medals to the top ten bond sellers, there was a mistake. Roosevelt had only nine medals to give, not ten, and when he got to Geisel standing at the end of the row of bond sellers he asked, "What's this boy doing here?" and was quickly escorted off the stage without receiving a medal.This incident traumatized Geisel, giving rise to an acute fear of public speaking held for the rest of his

life.
As a teenager, after being urged by his favorite English teacher, Geisel applied to Dartmouth College and in 1921, was accepted. Though he considered working toward a Ph.D. in English, he was only an average student. Esteemed by his peers for his sense of humor, he was given the title of editor-in-chief of Dartmouth's humor magazine, the Jack-O-Lantern. However, during his senior year, he and his friends were found drinking gin in his room, and because the Prohibition was still in effect, his punishment was detitlement of editor-in-chief and that he was not allowed submit work to the magazine. This did not stop Geisel. He continued to publish cartoons to the magazine under a pseudonym of T. Seuss (Theodor Seuss) or just Seuss. This was the first time on record in which he used his signature alias to publish work.
After graduating from Dartmouth with a B.A. in liberal arts in 1925, Geisel told his father he had gotten a scholarship to attend Oxford University. Geisel's father was extremely proud of his son and had it published in the Springfield Union newspaper that his son was accepted to Oxford the next day. Sadly, Geisel was exaggerating when he told his father this, though he’d applied, he was rejected. To avoid embarrassment, his father, who always wanted him to be a college professor, decided to pay the tuition anyway.
Upon arrival to Oxford, Geisel felt substantially less intelligent than his fellow classmates and as a result did a poor job academically. In fact, he did more doodling than he did note-taking. On the bright side, he met his eventual first wife, a fellow American student, Helen Palmer, who one day looked at his sketch pad and said, “You’re crazy to be a professor. What you really want to do is draw… That’s a very fine flying cow!” After a year of school, Geisel decided to leave Oxford to tour Europe for eight months before returning to the United States to become a cartoonist.
After marrying Helen in 1927, the couple moved to New York City, where he barely scraped by in their modest apartment. Finally, after a year of drawing cartoons in Judge magazine, one of which using a specific insecticide in the punchline, he found his first niche: creating advertisements, specifically for Flit insecticide, who would pay him twelve thousand dollars a year. His work entailed creating a comic that would ultimately end with the soon popular punchline “Quick, Henry, the Flit!” (There was even a song based on it.) He soon spread his unique illustrations to advertise for a variety of companies such as Holly Sugar, NBC, Ford, General Electric, and others.
In 1936, while on a ship, Geisel made up a limerick “And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street” to match the rhythm of the ship’s struggling engine in rough waters. After six months used to tweak the story and add drawings, twenty-seven publishers rejected the story because it lacked a clear theme. Geisel was just about ready to give up when he ran into an old friend from Dartmouth College buddy who was now an editor at Vanguard Press. He liked the story and thus Vanguard Press was the first publisher to release And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, previously titled A Story That No One Can Beat. The book received a strong positive response saying the book was different, original, and entertaining.
In 1954, when Geisel was challenged to write and illustrate a children's book using only the vocabulary of a kindergartner by journalist John Hersey, he accepted. It took him a year, a much longer time than he had expected, to create his children's book he is now famous for, The Cat in the Hat. How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, soon followed. These two Dr. Seuss books made Dr. Seuss a well known celebrity.
Although Dr.

Seuss won countless number of prizes including the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, Caldecott Honor Medals, and several doctorates, his primary motivation, his wife Helen, suffered from many lengthy and threatening illnesses including cancer. She ultimately committed suicide in 1967 and in 1968 Geisel remarried to an old friend, Audrey Stone Diamond. Along with a second wife, Geisel acquired his first and only children, Lark, fifteen at the time, and Lea, who was eleven. Although it was clear Geisel always wanted to have children, he and his wife were unable to. Instead, he would boast of a more-than-just-imaginary daughter, Chrysanthemum-Pearl. The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, his second children’s book to be published, was dedicated to “Chrysanthemum-Pearl (aged 89 months, going on 90).” He even included her on Christmas cards, along with Norval, Wally, Wickersham, Miggles, Boo-Boo, Thnud, and other make believe

children.
In 1990 Dr. Seuss published his final book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, and that he did. A year later, September 24, 1991, at the age of 87, Theodor Seuss Geisel died in his home from oral cancer.